Gustav Ziegler

Gustav Ziegler attends secondary school and becomes active in the Rhenania secondary school fraternity. After graduating from high school, he began his studies at the University of World Trade in Vienna, then switched to medicine; he did not finish his studies.

After the Anschluss, he continued to run the fraternity underground and, through the mediation of his fraternity brother Hans Dorrek, he came into contact with the "Meithner resistance group". Due to a spinal cord curvature, he was only mustered as "fit for work". During the war, he volunteered in a military hospital.

In a conversation in July 1943 with his former classmate Hermann Eder (lieutenant in the Wehrmacht and an avowed National Socialist), Gustav Ziegler said during the train journey from Vienna to Krems:

"[...] he was not so stupid as to finish his studies now so that he could be sent somewhere in the East. [...] The war is lost for us. Our propaganda is only based on lies and aims to mislead the people." - according to the VGH's reasoning.

He repeated this opinion at another meeting on October 7, 1943. He was therefore reported to the police by Hermann Eder, "because he came to the conclusion that Ziegler had become an outspoken opponent of the National Socialist Reich." Gustav Ziegler was subsequently arrested by the Gestapo on November 25, 1943. On 23 June 1944, the 3rd Senate of the Supreme Court in Vienna sentenced him to death for "subversion of military power and treasonous favoring of the enemy (§ 91 b, § 73 RStGB)" and deprived him of his honorary rights. The reasons for the verdict include:

"The defendant Gustav Ziegler twice made seriously defeatist remarks to a German officer and declared, among other things, that the war was lost and that there would be a second November 1918."